I’ve been translating for over twenty-five years, my entire adult life. The practice of translation is a dedication to something greater than myself, greater than my own lone voice. We often conceptualize the translator as speaking for someone else, in a kind of literary ventriloquism, but in a deeper sense, the translator is speaking with the original author. And each reader collaborates in producing a chorus of reading, interpretation, and enjoyment. It isn’t ventriloquism, but a powerful polyphony.
Every translator encounters voices with which their own voice blends easily, and others that produce dissonance. Zheng Xiaoqiong’s voice happens to be one that I can harmonize easily with. I understand her concerns and obsessions; they are mine as well. Abuse, exploitation, labor, privilege, the GDP, the pernicious ways in which an oppressive system coerces everyone within its reach to participate, to tacitly endorse, its own malevolent goals. We live in a time when things are getting worse, not better, and the systems in which we all participate on a daily basis are aiding and abetting that collapse.
Poetry can step outside of those systems. It isn’t all about what it says, it’s how it says it and how it gets read. Poetry sidesteps reason, which can make it fruitfully challenging to understand, couching a vital message in an anodyne package. Bei Dao’s line “I do not believe” shook China in the 1970s because readers could take from it their own personal message: every idealistic student and underpaid worker and free thinker, anyone desperate for relief from a confused, oppressive regime, could finish that line, in any way they wanted to. It was a slender life raft thrown to those drowning in officially sanctioned or long believed “truths.”
What truths do you no longer believe in?
Zheng Xiaoqiong perhaps never bought the official line in the first place, although she writes frequently about disillusionment, the shock of finding oneself participating at a tender age in a starkly exploitative economic system. Even in her early work, she seemed to come to the page with a startling wisdom, perhaps because of the seeming distance she keeps: from her own brutal reality as a young migrant worker, from her colleagues, her friends, her family, her feelings, from the horrors that surround her, from everything but her language. That, to her, is always intimate, even as her gaze retains the coolness and clarity of a citizen reporter or social anthropologist. Born in 1980 in a semi-rural area of Sichuan, Zheng worked her way out of poverty, starting in the factories and sweatshops of Dongguan and ending up as an editor at a major literary journal in Guangzhou. How did she get there? She wrote in living language what she saw, which takes tremendous courage, and a tremendous gift.
Her gift to us, to me personally, is her body of poetry. To translate a poem is to dwell in it, to dine on it, to take a deep dive into it. It’s to imbibe it and let it seep out of your pores. I find her work painful; I have lost sleep over it. The subjects her poems address—exploitative bosses, avulsions, severed fingers, chronic abuse, young women forced into prostitution, the suicide of desperate workers, the annihilation of ancient forests and fouling of rivers, the years spent bent over a work station breathing in toxic fumes, the utter degradation of the environment upon which everything (our literal survival!) is predicated, the desperation of people trying to claw their way up some ladder, even as that ladder proves to be a devious illusion—demand an internal reckoning from the reader. If it isn’t painful, you’re not really reading it.
Zheng Xiaoqiong rarely writes happy poems. For Zheng, and for me, the function of poetry, its innate raison d’être, is to mourn. And in mourning, to point a finger. Look! the poet cries, Look! Look at everything that’s been lost, that we are in the process of losing, that we are throwing away out of ignorance and fear and laziness and greed, the habits we’ve formed over a lifetime and cannot loosen our grasp on even if it kills us. It’s so much easier not to face it. It’s easier not to read. I’d rather close my eyes too. Wouldn’t we all like to live in an imaginary paradise, made out of Tik Tok and the hallucinations of the energy-sucking AI and dreams of a future on Mars. Meanwhile most of those gadgets, all that fuel for our fantasies, the heavy metals that form the internal components of our mutual self-destruction, are made in the factories and mined in the countryside of China.
In Chinese, the word for poetry is a compound meaning literally poetry-song. The ancient Chinese understood the power of song, and of singing together. Famously, in the Tang Dynasty, friends would get together to chant poetry aloud, to join forces not just artistically but practically. Who knows how many coalitions were built on those occasions, when poems were sung back and forth between old friends and new acquaintances and potential allies at court. What coalitions could be built today around a song that resonated, as Zheng’s poems do, one that made clear what the stakes are and all that we are abandoning, destroying, taking for granted? I have to still believe that many of us would join in that chorus.
